


Invisible Scoobies

by IronAndRags



Category: Le città invisibili | Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino, Scooby Doo - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-07
Updated: 2018-11-07
Packaged: 2019-08-20 07:26:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16551527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IronAndRags/pseuds/IronAndRags
Summary: "You drive through misty marshes on the way to your cousin's lake house, said Velma Dinkley to the Orange Slime. And in the deepest swamp your van gives out, and strands you in a tiny town.Like all towns, this town is haunted.Was it you or I who traveled? asked the Orange Slime. My brain is made of space goop, and I am easily confused.It was I, said the meddling teen. But travel with me. We are almost there."(fragments)





	1. Chapter 1

You drive through misty marshes on the way to your cousin's lake house, said Velma Dinkley to the Orange Slime. And in the deepest swamp your van gives out, and strands you in a tiny town.

Like all towns, this town is haunted.

_Was it you or I who traveled? asked the Orange Slime. My brain is made of space goop, and I am easily confused._

__

__

_It was I, said the meddling teen. But travel with me. We are almost there._

~~~

The repairs will take all night. You rest in rooms offered by Old Man Jones, who owns the paint factory.

But a teen like you, a restless searcher, never really sleeps. So in the night, you are awakened.

In this town, on this night, you are awakened by a screaming skeleton with a sword. Sometimes it is a headless horse, a cyclops, chupacabra, ghost, or ghoul. But tonight it is a pirate ghost, its rusted cutlass darting back and forth.

The skeleton is an ancient thing. Its bones are browned and brittled, weathered by sands or ocean storms that you will never know. It seems corporeal and not. It touches you, and you leap, you flee, you trip against a marble bust and tumble into a secret room. And there you find-

~~~

_But ah, said Velma Dinkley, I can see that you have heard this tale before. The rustic place, the haunting, the discovery. The teenage sleuth, triumphant, tearing off the old man's mask. None of this is new to you. I can see you have grown tired. But there are stranger things in the world, O Orange Slime, things that before, perhaps, I was hesitant to tell._

__

__

_Do not feed us to the crocodiles yet, Orange Slime, but listen to a different tale..._


	2. Chapter 2

_You walk softly through an abandoned amusement park, said Velma Dinkley, hesitating. The Orange Slime, as best it could, nodded, expressing its assent. So she continued the story that the Slime demanded._

You walk softly through an abandoned amusement park, said Velma Dinkley to the Orange Slime. This was FreakyWorld, once a bustling attraction, now empty. It is so derelict that that it is owned now by a careless, self-important banker, and inhabited only by its ghosts.

But what ghosts they are.

The cheery mascot grins like a demon, startling Shaggy from his skin. Wind howls darkly through the rotten struts of great roller coasters, their tracks broken, their cars abandoned. Harmless animals, easy to mistake for zombie ghosts, patrol the night-black Tunnel of Love. When Fred and Daphne enter that tunnel to investigate, you have to wonder: Who were the lovers who sailed through it, when this park was alive? That short, cavernous, rat-infested tunnel. It seems like it could never have been used. Who left riding cars at the pinnacle of Barfer's Plunge, that black-and-green, menacing roller coaster? Did they unlock their harnesses, and clamber down the wooden struts? What is the logic of that?

FreakyWorld is a half-imagined place, half-built. It was invented, perhaps, as a ruin.

You try to wander through the amusement park's forgotten paths, but somehow, you find you cannot. FreakyWorld is a circumscribed place. It has no restaurant, no parking lot. It exists as a backdrop. When Shaggy and Scooby fling themselves, by slingshot, into the cars at the top of Barfer's Plunge, its _telos_ is completed. When the cars fly off the end of its broken track, in some sense, Barfer's Plunge no longer exists.

FreakyWorld may once have been a great amusement park, as the owner's daughter says, but it is fundamentally ephemeral. It is a place that makes sense only as a once-great ruin; the greatness itself is an impossible paradox. As you drive away from FreakyWorld, you cannot help but feel that it has already vanished, swallowed up forever by the fog behind you.


	3. Chapter 3

_Fred Jones wiped his brow, nervous and uncertain. Before him was the Orange Slime, awaiting its story, and below him, the pit of crocodiles. Not every tale is easy to tell, and Fred Jones was no perfect teller. But he knew he had to do his part, and tell his tale. He swallowed, and, hesitating, he began._

~~~

You drive into an Old West mining town where things do not have names. The kindly gentleman who makes you flapjacks and complains about the monster has no name. The mine, which yawns, black and empty, has no name. The sheriff shooing you away from the mine entrance wears no badge, because he, too, is nameless.

The dusty, creaking saloon where you spend the night has no name. For today, in this town, you have no name. Your girlfriend, clinging to you fearfully, has no name

And the feeling on the back of your neck when a cold wind blows through the shutters at midnight has no name. The monster has no name.

How can you unmask it? You follow the motions. Your nameless friend, her glasses gleaming, follows its footprints to the mouth of the mine. Your dog leans, quite by accident, against the concealed panel on the rock wall. And with nameless rollerskates and a nameless fishing net, you catch the monster.

But when you pull the mask off to reveal a nameless face, how can that be victory? For once, your nameless friend has no words. Without names, there is no shock of recognition. The footprints, which have no name, belong to unmarked boots. And when you go back to town, the kindly gentleman still makes you flapjacks, and the sheriff still patrols. Without names, nothing is connected. Nothing can be resolved. The perpetrator could be anyone, or no one.

And what did that perpetrator do? Take on the image of a nameless monster. Without names, there can be no mystery, and no resolution. What does it mean, then, that you were here at all?

How will you know?


	4. Chapter 4

In your travels, you have come upon a spooky old mansion, said Shaggy Rogers to the Orange Slime.

In this spooky old mansion, the walls are not solid. Panels fall open on the walls, trapdoors appear on every floor. The bookshelves rotate over and over, like a dead man turning in his grave. This is a mansion with no permanent form. It cannot be mapped. Old Man Longjohn says he sleeps in the attic, but the stairs fall away. The attic vanishes, then reappears, beneath a grate in the basement. Nothing here is as it seems.

You try to follow the footsteps of the zombie ghoul that haunts these rooms. His shoe tracks lead you up, and then down, across walkways and through forgotten libraries. But the ghoul is never there, and your own steps are unretraceble.

Old Man Longjohn's manor is infinite, and infinitely mutable. You tumble in one door and out the one beside it. Somehow, nothing can be traced. Somehow, it is inescapable.

Surely (Fred says), the mansion holds within its walls all fears, but also all desires. If you could wander through it for a thousand years, peering under curtains and through the eyes of portraits, you may not find where the zombie ghoul had gone to, but perhaps you would discover, deep inside the mansion, the secrets of your own heart.

But it cannot be, you tell him, said Shaggy Rogers to the Orange Slime. That journey, that voyage into infinity, is for others to make. Such discoveries are not fated for sleuths like yourself. You must tumble from the drainpipe, get caught in your own makeshift snare, and emerge from the mansion. All of Mystery, Inc. must make that journey back.

For those who wander into Old Man Longjohn's mansion looking for the secrets of their hearts do not return. And you must return, each of you, to solve other mysteries. What lies at the heart of that mansion will be forever hidden from you.


End file.
